The proliferation of digital imaging devices in the home such as digital cameras, camcorders, and home scanners has resulted in a rapid growth of the number of digital images residing on a consumers home personal computer. In addition the growth in the number of consumers connected to a network such as the World Wide Web has lead to the introduction of a number of product and service offerings in the area of digital photography. These service and product offerings rely on the consumer transmitting their image data from the home computer to the remotely located network service provider in order to produce a hardcopy print or other product or to perform some image related service.
Currently available digital cameras and home scanners have the capability of generating a high resolution digital data file of the original scene. Advances in digital cameras and scanners continually increase the resolution of the images captured and the resulting size of the data record. These high resolution data records are sufficient to produce a wide variety of image based products including enlargements, gifts, album pages, and image imprinted articles. In addition it is common for a consumer to acquire several images from a single event or to accumulate a series of images from a series of events. This accumulation of images allows the consumer to produce products or take advantage of services which involve multiple images such as an album or CD product. A consumer may also wish to accumulate a set of images before attempting to generate a series of hardcopy prints or articles simply for the convenience of performing the operation once with a set of images versus multiple times. In either case the result is that often a consumer, when accessing remotely provided imaging services and products will do so with a set of images in one transaction.
Because the product and service offerings are provided by a remote site and involve the customers images, it is necessary for the remote image service provider to have access to the digital image record\file in order to represent to the consumer the products and services. Typically the workflow for this type of interaction consists of transferring the high resolution digital record from the consumers home PC to the network photoservice provider, constructing and order for goods and services using the network photoservice provider software application and then completing the transaction. The network photoservice provider then produces the goods and services and returns the finished products to the consumer either electronically or by physical delivery. A problem, which often arises in this scenario is that the consumer is faced with a lengthy, time consuming, process of transferring one or more high resolution digital image records from their home computer to the network photoservice provider before they are able to make and specify their purchase decisions. In some cases this transfer of image data can take several hours. Many times the consumer cannot make a purchase decision until the images are manipulated and presented in a finished form. The result is that the barrier of having to upload a large amount of image data and the time investment associated with that discourages the user from initiating the purchase cycle or the time invested by the consumer in the transfer of image data to the service provider is wasted if no product or service is purchased. What is needed is a way to allow the consumer to browse and make purchase decisions on products and services, before they invest a significant amount of time in the transfer of data while maintaining their ability to view an accurate visual representation of the final goods and services.